The free app, which enables people to record and share clips of up to six seconds with other Vine users as well as on Twitter and Facebook, has been available on iPhone since late January.

In a blog post announcing the Android port, Twitter revealed that Vine has so far attracted 13m users on iPhone, although it did not make it clear whether these are monthly active users or all registered users.

“Vine for Android has many of the features that more than 13 million people have grown to love: easy video creation with automatic playback and sound; Explore, where you can discover popular posts and see what’s trending; and Find Friends, where you can find and invite people you know to join,” explained Android engineer Sara Haider.

The new version has one feature that’s not (yet) in Vine for iPhone: zoom. However, some features are missing on Android, including support for smartphones’ front-facing cameras, hashtags, search and sharing to Facebook.

Complaints about these omissions are the reason Vine has a modest average review rating of 3.2 stars out of five on Android’s Google Play app store at the time of writing, although Twitter says the features will be added soon.

“Though we’ve been very focused on releasing Vine for Android, we’ve continued to release updates and add new features to the iOS app. As a result, the two apps are not perfectly in sync, but that won’t be the case for long,” writes Haider.

The coming weeks will see “frequent updates” to the Vine Android app to add these features. “Of course, this is only the beginning – we have exciting plans for features that could exist only on Android,” adds Haider.

Vine’s roots are in a startup of the same name, which was acquired by Twitter in October 2012 before ever launching its app. Four months later, Twitter released it for iPhone as an official sub-brand.

Vine’s Android launch is also good news for the growing number of brands who are using the service. While Twitter isn’t (yet) selling advertising on Vine, there are plenty of branded videos being shared through the app. Bacardi, Urban Outfitters, Gap, Dunkin Donuts, Doritos, Next and Samsung are among the brands that have been active on Vine in 2013.

Based on its analysis of 10m tweets over a one-month period, Unruly also claimed that on average, five tweets per second contain a Vine link – note, this includes multiple tweets of the same clips, so it’s not five new Vine videos every second.

Vine has also made a few waves within the creative community. Some of the most-shared clips have come from music artists like Tyler, the Creator, Wiz Khalifa and Harry Styles from One Direction. Meanwhile, the Tribeca film festival held a #6SECFILMS Vine contest in April 2013, attracting more than 400 entries from animators and filmmakers.

In a blog post titled “I Think I Broke Something: The Story of Rickrolling Vine”, Smidlein apologised to Twitter’s engineering team for the jape. “Vine is a really well built concept, app, and service. They’ve scaled wonderfully, and I hope that people like me don’t discourage them to continue doing great things.”